Budget of only $609 Million.

That's the 2016 budget for the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That's a lot of money.  Figure you can hire a bean counter for $100K, that budget will hire 6000 bean counters.  Erica Groshen, former BLS commissioner, writing an op-ed in today's Wall St Journal, thinks BLS needs more money to fulfill it's duties.
  These duties include publishing the monthly jobs report.  Crucial work that is, especially as ADP, the big payroll agency, publishes it's own jobs report, a week ahead of the BLS report, based on very credible data. Funding for BLS got so tight last year that they dropped the "International Labor Comparisons" program, and the "Mass Layoff Statistics" program.  Awful that is.  Of course I have never heard of either program before, and from the titles I gotta wonder if they were worth a plugged nickel. 
   The most important thing BLS can do, is compute the numbers the same way, every month, every year, so that changes in the number indicates changes in the real economy and not merely changes in book keeping.  Only if you forbid book keeping changes can you tell if things are actually getting better or worse.  Which is why we care about the numbers.
   Today, they ought to get the jobs report out by putting the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.  Use the same spread sheet every year.  I don't see why we need a staff of 6000 bean counters to get this done.  I'd think 60 would be plenty.
  $609 million isn't "real money" in Everett Dirksen's phrase (A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money).  But it is getting close to a billion, when I think it ought to be $6 million.